Rite of Passage by Greenstorm
Rite of Passage By Volaya I can't hide from myself forever. Her own words, those, reverberating in her head, bouncing and skittering through her mind. Other thoughts, half-realised and clinging to the corners of her consciousness, spiralled away from that one central remembered string of sound. I can't hide from myself forever, she'd said. She had been right, too. It took her a long time to realise that it was true. Another word emerged, spotlit brightly in the murky silences of her skull. It was a frightening word, quickly reduced in self-defense to its component rhythms. Freedom. Freedom. Free-dum. Dah-dum. Da-dah-dah-dah-dum. Her exit, when the ship landed on Vollista, was silent and efficient with only the briefest stop to collect her equipment. ---- It was raining when she woke up. Small cool needles of wet sky arced down to touch her, speckling and then washing away dotted patterns on her bare skin. The water quickly soaked through the thin cloth she wore and plastered it cold, a study in contrasts, against the fragile heat of her body. The sensation was so utterly strange that at first she couldn't move. Eventually hot salt water mingled with the fresh. Small hopeless sobs formed a counterpoint to the enormous white noise of water on leaf and rock that had echoed here on and off since the beginning of time. A time later she stopped crying, opening her eyes on a world that she had carefully narrowed into its component parts: objects she had come here to study. Objects, things -- pseudopinus rudra, verna voltanii, sarni sinuata, viridiana voltanii -- the familiar, smoothly flowing Terran scientific names of her studies were very comforting. She spared a brief thought for Voltan, the first botanist to try to bring some sort of order to the wild array of common names with which Vollistans labelled their flora. He'd been immortalised in scientific texts for it, and his name lived on in the objects of his studies as well. Her mind dwelled gratefully on the trivia, on the concept of immortality, and shuddered away blindly from vaster things. It was only after she'd cleaned up, changing yesterday's muddy clothes for fresh clothes that soon soaked through and assuring herself that her supplies were still carefully watertight, that she noticed the spot where she had fallen last night. In the unlit darkness she had collapsed randomly, too sunk within herself to be aware of her surroundings. There, amidst the torn, claw-marked earth, muddied with rain and bearing mute evidence of her struggles the night before, there were flowers. Poor shredded things, they were -- viridiana voltanii ssp comfort, a common variety, her mind informed her. Volaya cried for two days. There was no why. ---- For a period of three months the girl worked, filling her days with the endless minutae involved in gathering botanical information. Leaf-width, stem-width, ring count, crown-to-stem ratio, stems per hectare: these things were her escape, her job, and she did them well and thouroughly. Inevitably, every third day there was the solar surge and she would retreat to the caves with most of the mobile creatures on the planet. Many of the caves were populated by Vollistans, and the nights spent in those passed quickly, the space between supper and sleep full of music and song and old stories. Her need for companionship, long since stifled, stirred within her. If nothing else, she thought, when I'm with them I don't need to think. The rest of the time, alone, she sifted through memories. "I can't hide from myself forever, Davian! I don't belong here and you know it!" Her aura had been so bright that her own red anger reflected off the tired planes of the old man's face, casting shadows that deepened his wrinkles. He had winced, she remembered, those distinctive calm eyes with their epicanthic fold narrowing aginst the brightness. Incandescently angry she had been, her skin crawling and tingling and twitching with the demands her emotion put on it. "I'm going! I need to do my own thing!" He had always known when she needed a good fight and when she needed reassurance. He had always known everything about her. She wondered, sometimes, if he wasn't part of a rehabilitation team, someone assigned to keep an eye on a marginal case. On her case. It didn't matter to her, in the end. He was her friend, and that was enough. He'd known what he was doing, she realised now. A few murmured words and she'd stormed off to this planet, vowing independance. The thought crossed her mind that she shouldn't be so easy to manipulate, but it was soon dismissed. Somehow on Vollista her defenses weren't so important, melting away even from her own inward-searching gaze. Hiding from herself, she'd said, and her anger had jarred loose a lot for her to find now that hiding was less vital. ---- No words can tell of the growth pangs of a soul directly. I give you your own memories here, a listing of your own firsts. You were young once. There was a first time you looked at the world and found it beautiful. There was a first time you considered your beliefs and found them lacking. There was a first time you considered your beliefs and found them good. There was a first time you depended on your own abilities utterly and they did not let you down. And there was a first time you realised that, however good the intentions of others, you could always depend on yourself. Remember these, and know that there is a young Light Singer somewhere who is no different from you. ---- It was with fear, two weeks before she was to leave, that she realised she couldn't remember his words. Her frantic mind unearthed a slow careful treatise on the necessities of a strong cultural identity, a small chuckle at some joke, instruction on the proper way to hold chopsticks but nothing on that last, deciding conversation before she left. "I may not belong there but I'll have space to breathe at least! You're killing me here, squeezing me and I can't breathe!" He'd made her a milkshake, then, like he'd done that first day and all the days after when she'd needed the comfort of attention. In slow, leisurely fashion the chocolate was melted, the milk and eggs heated through, the whole boiled and cooled and poured in to the strange ice-lined machine. There was a quiet time sitting across the table from him. They took turns keeping the handle of the ancient machine turning, slow and even. A time for talk, a comfortable ceremony that Davian never interrupted for anything; it was an oasis of certainty in Volaya's life, perhaps the only one she'd ever had. It had worked to soothe her the first time when she had been brought, a kicking biting mass of teeth and hair, to that cabin in Beacon. It worked, too, the last time, and then she left. She remembered each scene that day in silent colour, could see her own navy-lit hands cleaning the dented metal cannister from which she had sipped. It hurt her not to remember. She felt as if a piece of herself was missing. The old man's influence held firm, though, and that morning ome days before she left was the last time she descended into the blackness. For the last time she woke on the shredded grass, scraped the dirt from under her fingernails, and ate breakfast with a throat lanced through with the stinging pain of screams. It was a few minutes' work to pack up her completed study, run over the information, and send it winging through the stars to those for which she'd obtained it. It was half a day's journey to the group of Vollistans she was most familiar with and she immersed herself deeply in the culture, soaking it up as a shield with which to ward herself when she returned to Sanctuary after the time was up. ---- The journey back was gentler, and it took her the leaving of her race to realise that they had accepted her. After that, it was not difficult to know what was holding her apart. Herself. Davian would have been proud. ---- It was not, on final thought, surprising to her that he wasn't there when she got home. She surveyed the empty cottage thoughtfully and left it there, the door open hospitably in case he should come back, and embarked finally and inevitably on her own path. Freedom. The freedom to be herself to herself. There was no other. Written in the beginning, in 2001 Category:OtherSpace Stories